What's Happening in Other
If we assume that the Ultimate Computer was purposefully constructed in Other, we can immediately answer the puzzle of the origin of the Universe. It's simply a matter of the following process taking place in Other. The initial conditions are set into the engine and the engine is set into motion; it starts to compute. Those two steps are outside the domain of physics. If we write a program to simulate the operation of the Space Shuttle, we don't have to worry about conservation of mass if we teil a programmer to change the amount of fuel in the simulated shuttle. It's just a number that is set by a programmer. However once the simulation starts, if it is programmed properly, then what happens during the simulation will be in accord with the laws of physics.
If the purpose of Other is to find something like an answer to something like a question, we still have the possibilities that:
- What we see as our universe might be working towards that answer.
- The Universe we know, in its entirety, might be an artifact.
In either case, our existence here on Earth might or might not be completely incidental to the purpose.
We can also ask: "If something in Other was so smart and capable as to be able to create our universe, why didn't it just think and figure out the answer in its head?" (Please pardon the anthropomorphic allusions.) One of the interesting results of computer science, that transcends the laws of physics, is that an answer obtained by running a computer for a certain number of steps, cannot in general be found by some shortcut. This is a consequence of Turing's famous halting problem. The name "halting problem" comes from the old idea that a computer at work should halt when it gets the answer. The question is, can some other computer look at what the first computer is trying to do and figure out a way to get the answer in fewer steps? Of course, if the first computer is inefficiently implemented, then some more efficient computer could speed things up. If the program is coded so that it runs inefficiently, then reprogramming it could speed things up. However, there is no way, in general to take programs and to reprogram them so that they now run faster. This limitation known as the Speed Up Theorem.
What the Speed Up Theorem tells us is that if Finite Nature is true, and if the thing in Other was competent, then there is no way for it to get the answer any faster than by letting the Universe run its course. Interestingly, answers that do not require computation are just those &at have analytic solutions. We know our universe is universal (in the computer sense) simply because we can build computers; this would not be possible in a universe that was not universal.
As to the question "Why didn't the thing in Other just do it in its head?" The answer is quite straight forward: Doing it on a computer is exactly the same thing as doing it in one's head. Both are examples of using an informational process to get to the answer. We are not referring to the thing in Other finding an analytical solution in its head (the speedup theorem forbids such solutions) but rather to it imagining each step of some cellular automaton in its head. Strangely enough, that's exactly the same as doing it on a computer. A common fable is that maybe God is dreaming all this, that we are characters in that dream, and that we should be careful not to do anything that might wake him up!
